Thoughts for the Weekend & this Week’s Links

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How to Design a Winery Before Bed.

After finishing my day’s work yesterday, I set myself a challenge: design a winery before bed.
I’d spent the morning in a medieval vault and a rooftop bar discussing the project with my group of students, whose final-year project it is – see the TFTW from a couple of weeks ago.

I was less interested in the design itself than in explaining the process: how to go from a blank screen to something that fits both the brief and the site. So I sat down with a cup of tea, opened the site map and design brief, and hit record.

It took three hours to produce a simple set of diagrammatic plans, sections, and a 3D model. It wasn’t as easy as I expected. There’s a lot to fit onto a tight urban site with rights-to-light issues, overlooking constraints, and historic walls along one side.

But it was a valuable use of time. I now understand the project in some detail, which will help in tutoring the students over the next couple of months. More importantly, it gives them a clear idea of the steps to take when tackling a design problem.

The temptation is to try to design something that looks like a building from the outset – to come up with a form and then fit everything into it. It’s far more effective to start by understanding the site: where the access points and routes are, what the key views and sunlight conditions are, and how surrounding buildings will be affected.

With experience, one can read a place quickly and get a feel for it – but either way, observation and research come first. Miss that stage at your peril.

Next comes understanding how the accommodation might fit on the site.
In the case of a winery, there are two large halls requiring 8-metre ceiling heights, plus a restaurant and bar that need to face the public. How high would you need to be to see the sea from a rooftop bar? Could the 8-metre halls provide that elevation?

I quickly established that putting the halls above ground would block light into neighbouring buildings. That meant placing them in a basement extending across the site — and with that, a restaurant four floors up was no longer possible, as the brief didn’t include enough additional space to build beneath it.

Some quick decisions based on analysing the brief and site led to a building with a large basement and a ground floor accommodating delivery, processing, and bottling at the rear – with a restaurant, bar, tasting room, and courtyard to the south-facing front.

I started drawing in 2D, creating plans and sections that cut through the site and adjacent buildings, to test different arrangements of space and function. At this stage, I’m not worrying about toilets or details; those are just blocked out to allow for the larger key spaces.

After the first hour, I understood what would fit and how it would interact with its surroundings. I’d also confirmed that a basement was essential and a sea view was a non-starter. Time for dinner.

A break is always good for background thinking. A couple of hours later, I was back at my desk.

With a plan forming in my mind, I continued in 2D for another half-hour. During that time, my thoughts turned to structure and form. The surrounding medieval vaults (many once used for storing wine) offered an obvious cue, especially with the need for a large basement. I found myself drawn to that type of form and its resulting materials. Experience helps here: an experienced designer has built up a repertoire of organisational, structural, and aesthetic types to draw from. Referencing precedents accelerates the process and builds confidence.

So the plan became two large vaults, about 15 by 40 metres, sitting side by side below ground, running north–south. Each vault is 8 metres high at the centre to accommodate the tanks. Above these, three 10-metre-wide vaults run east–west. The third vault on the south side becomes the restaurant and bar, cut through by a high-walled courtyard. Earlier in the day, we’d been in a courtyard space formed by a medieval building with no roof and six-meter-high walls, so I know it will work well and serve as a nice reference for the new winery nearby.

Now into 3D. I rapidly extruded the vault shapes, lined and stacked them up. It all worked surprisingly well. I brought in the 3D model of the surrounding site, cut a big hole in the ground, and after two and a half hours, had a massing model I could walk around virtually.

With the model in place, I began cutting openings for stairs, doors, and windows to make the most of light and views. The building reminded me a little of the Kimbell Art Museum by Louis Kahn, with its carefully aligned barrel vaults. I looked it up to explain the reference—design precedents, which again provide reassurance and direction.

The final half-hour was spent creating drawings: turning the model into something printable and easy to read. The plans were still diagrammatic — no doors or windows yet, just white blocks over black walls to suggest openings. I added structural grids for clarity, and along with four 3D views, produced six A3 sheets and three hours of narrated video explaining the process.

That’s the important bit. While I had fun sketching the beginnings of a building, the real value lies in showing how it’s done — in revealing the steps and the thinking behind them. It’s much like my YouTube videos, where people seem to enjoy the process as much as the outcome. Note to self: I really should do more of those. Several people have emailed this week asking me to look at a house they’re buying after seeing one.

I remember an old lecturer of mine, Jay Potts, used to come into the studio on a Monday morning, all excited because he’d built something in ArchiCAD. This was 1992, 3D computer-aided design was new and hardly used, but he’d got into it early. We used to think he was mad spending his weekend designing a building for the apparent fun of it on one of our project sites!

I think he understood something I only realised years later — that designing for the joy of it keeps you sharp, curious, and always learning.

All the best